title: The development of anticipatory cognitive control processes in task-switching: an ERP study in children, adolescents, and young adults.
abstract: To investigate the development of advance task-set updating and reconfiguration, behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data were recorded in children (9-10 years), adolescents (13-14 years), and young adults (20-27 years) in a cued task-switching paradigm. In pure blocks, the same task was repeated. In mixed blocks, comprised of stay and switch trials, two tasks were intermixed. Age differences were found for stay-pure performance (mixing costs) in the 600-ms but not in the 1200-ms cue-target interval (CTI). Children showed larger reaction time mixing costs than adults. The ERPs suggested that the larger costs were due to delayed anticipatory task-set updating in children. Switch-stay performance decrements (switch costs) were age-invariant in both CTIs. However, ERP data suggested that children reconfigured the task-set on some stay trials, rather than only on switch trials, suggesting the continued maturation of task-set reconfiguration processes.
authors.affiliation: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, NY 10522, USA. amanzi@mercy.edu
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Manzi
authors.forename: Doreen
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nessler
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Czernochowski
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Friedman
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology